On June 4, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci walked into a meeting with CIA personnel. He wasn't there to answer questions. He was there to tell them which scientists to call — scientists whose conclusions happened to match the story he'd been telling Congress and the American public for over a year.
The CIA took notes. They followed up.
That detail comes from hundreds of pages of newly declassified documents released on June 18 by outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, her final act before leaving the Trump administration. The documents lay out, in granular detail, how Fauci — then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — didn't just fund the research that likely sparked a global pandemic. He built the machine that kept anyone from saying so.
The mechanics are worth understanding, because they're not complicated. They're just brazen.
Fauci's NIAID funneled millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. When the pandemic broke out from that same city, the man who funded the work became the man in charge of explaining it. Nobody in Washington seemed to find that arrangement worth questioning — at least not publicly.
Behind the scenes, Fauci was busy. In May 2021, he advised intelligence community officials to consult Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen — who had co-authored the March 2020 "Proximal Origin" paper in Nature Medicine arguing the virus arose naturally. By June 2021, he was steering analysts toward the work of Tulane University professor Robert Garry, another co-author on that same paper. An internal communication from one intelligence official captured the dynamic plainly: "Given Dr. Fauci's background we absolutely would like to follow-up on his outreach suggestions."
The intelligence community didn't just take his suggestions. They built their baseline assessment around them. The National Intelligence Council used "Proximal Origin" as a foundational document. Meanwhile, University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric — who had co-authored a 2018 grant proposal with Wuhan lab researchers — sat on the Biological Science Expert Group advising the IC on the very question of where the virus came from.
The foxes weren't just guarding the henhouse. They'd designed the henhouse, staffed it, and written the inspection report.
And at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Z Division had quietly reached a very different conclusion. In May 2020 — more than a year before Fauci's CIA sit-down — their assessment stated: "We assess that all the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus were present at the Wuhan Institute." That assessment got buried.
Whistleblowers inside the intelligence community tried to flag the problem. According to the declassified documents, they reported retaliation for challenging the IC's handling of the origins question. One contractor was terminated days after coming forward to ODNI. Managers reminded analysts who advocated for the lab-leak hypothesis that leadership would determine who got promoted — a message that didn't require a decoder ring.
Fauci, for his part, told Congress on May 11, 2021: "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute." The declassified records suggest that statement was, to use the polite term, not accurate. Rep. Darrell Issa put it more directly: "It appears as though he willfully impeded Congress and everyone else in getting to the truth."
Gabbard's written statement accompanying the release didn't mince words either. "The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook," she wrote. "Politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected President by restricting his access to vital facts needed to keep the country safe."
The administration Fauci undermined was, of course, Trump's first term — where the sitting president was denied the intelligence picture on a pandemic killing Americans because one bureaucrat had a conflict of interest the size of a biosafety lab.
Now 85 years old and teaching at Georgetown University, Fauci sits under an 11-year blanket pardon issued by President Biden in his final minutes in office — signed, notably, with an autopen. Sen. Rand Paul has argued the pardon should be challenged in court on those grounds alone. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called the conduct described in the documents "among the most consequential crimes in human history."
The Washington Post, which published a 9,000-word feature on Fauci not long ago, has not published a single word about the declassification.
A man funded the research. The research likely caused the pandemic. The man then controlled the investigation into the pandemic's origins. He hand-picked the experts, shaped the intelligence, punished the dissenters, and lied to Congress about the funding. And when his political allies lost power, they gave him a pardon so broad it covers everything back to January 1, 2014.
That's not a cover-up. That's an infrastructure project.
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